Two Trees, Two More Miles

The movie 300 is based upon the real-life Battle of Thermopylae.   Columbia is poised to pass 300 pre-orders! I am so thankful to everyone who has bought a book, or a couple of books, or invested in hosting a book party. 500 is the goal! If you have not bought a book yet, I hope today's update gives you reason to click over to the campaign page and make a buy. The spy thriller genre is well-known for pulling plot lines from the headlines. For example, 9/11 spawned a whole new subgenre . And, after the 2016 elections, there was a resurgence of titles focused on Russian ops and some of the genre's great heroes found themselves up against the FSB and conspirators in the US . While some thrillers exist in the real world (I'll use Grisham's Pelican Brief as a familiar example: real Washington, real institutions like the Supreme Court), they recreate that real world from whole cloth (fake justices, fake President, etc.). Other thrillers rely on the reader...

Saint Basil's Cathedral and the GUM Department Store in Red Square - Photo by Jorge Lascar Saturday marked the conclusion of the first week of the Columbia campaign.  Based largely on some LinkedIn posts and a few emails to my own and my family's personal networks, the book has 156 pre-orders. By Saturday night, it seemed it was time to start working hard. I asked my wife and daughter to share the book on Instagram and planned my own return from five years of self-imposed social media exile, re-establishing a Twitter presence. It quickly became clear that this phase of marketing was going to result in all the right people taking notice. Who, you ask? Well, just hours after my wife and daughter posted Columbia to their Instagram, I was the recipient of this charming message from the social media site (note the Red Square*): See, when your public LinkedIn profile indicates that you were an intelligence officer and that you were educated in Russian at the Defens...